Andrew Blum is an author and journalist, writing about technology, infrastructure, architecture, design, cities, art and travel. 

His 2012 book, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, was the first ever book-length look at the physical infrastructure of the Internet—all the data centers, undersea cables and tubes filled with light. It was published in 2012 to wide acclaim, became a National Bestseller, and has been translated into eleven languages. Andrew discussed Tubes with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air; BBC 4 presented it as a “Book of the Week”; and Blum spoke about his journey on the stages of TED Global. Tubes is widely used in high school and college classrooms, and has become a standard reference for politicians and industry executives looking to understand how the Internet works. (In 2022, Blum wrote about where the internet goes next, in Rest of World.)

His second book, The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast, was published in 2019 by Ecco/HarperCollins in the US, The Bodley Head in the UK, Knauss in Germany, and Raffaello Cortina Editore in Italy. It was adapted in Time; reviewed in The New Yorker and The Economist; featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition and the PBS NewsHour; and became an episode of 99% Invisible.

As a magazine journalist, Andrew has published dozens of feature stories in publications including Time, WIRED, Popular Science, Vanity Fair, Road & Track, Rest of World, Lapham’s Quarterly, The New York Times, The New Yorker and Metropolis.

As a speaker, he has given over a hundred talks at conferences, universities and corporations—like TED, Greenbuild, The Next Web, and SXSW; the United States State Department, the World Trade Organization and the MIT Media Lab; Google, Microsoft, and the Brooklyn Book Festival.  

He has degrees in literature from Amherst College and human geography from the University of Toronto, and lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York.